Tag: angel

Following the recent news about Cate, I’ve been making and thinking and thinking about making and making about thinking a lot. As a result of this immersion, joyful connections are revealing themselves to me, and I’ll write more about this soon.

For now though, I want to release another Guardian as a free art drop. This one was live painted at a recent story telling event, and it is titled ‘Angel’. It will be placed sometime over the weekend.

Last week I was at the Workplace Trends Research Spring Summit. I was there to learn, to do some live painting, and to give a talk on creative practice at work. This is a short blog post about a piece of art I made on the day.

Early on in the presentations, I listened to Nicola Gillen and Charlotte Hermans talking about how AECOM is undertaking new research to investigate predictors of wellbeing and performance in populations of office workers.

AECOM is testing to identify the most influential factors of work (e.g., job design, management, culture) vs. workplace (e.g., quality of work settings, noise, air quality) in predicting physical, mental, social, intellectual, spiritual and material dimensions of wellbeing, performance and satisfaction. Something which caught my attention was Nicola’s observation of the importance of psychological safety. In particular she spoke of the idea of being your ‘whole self’ at work, and how potentially harmful it can be in a workplace where this doesn’t feel possible.

I know from personal experience and from listening to many stories, how tricky it can be in some places to be yourself, to be open and honest about what you see, and how it’s making you think and feel. As I considered how I might get over that sense of reluctance when things are a little unclear, I began to paint. The blurred background indicates uncertainty, things moving at speed, not being quite sure what’s going on. The winged creature indicates a guardian within – open arms encouraging that sense of being sufficiently confident to speak truth to power, to be myself at work. I chose to title the piece ‘Thank You For Letting Me Be Myself Again.’

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Above are photographs of the piece as it was finished and displayed in conference, and a couple of close ups so you can see some of the detail. It took me all morning and some of the lunch break to paint this, each line on the wings is a single free hand brush stroke. Patience was required to complete the piece, and at times during the making, I felt like quitting and starting again on something easier. I’m glad I persisted, people gave me lots of positive feedback on the finished piece and it sits well alongside some of my other recent works.

I’ll share more live painting from the event soon, and some slides and speaker notes too. For now, thank you Nicola for the spark of an idea which brought the art into being.

I’m in the final stages of preparation for my submission to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. In the run up to a decision like this, there’s a strong whiff of doubt in the air…will I be able to come up with anything vaguely good enough…?

At first I had it in mind to rework a failed experiment which you can see emerge here a couple of days ago, and I thought it was the one. Since then I’ve been reminded of this piece (painted in October 2017) which I am considering…

…and then with just a day or two remaining I made this, a return to my recent angel designs. This is the largest of them to date, painstakingly crafted onto an 80cm x 30cm canvas.

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I like them all. Now here I am – with too many choices, and only a day left to decide. Sometimes The Angels Punish Us, By Answering Our Prayers.

On the plus side at least I have choices to make, much better to be in that position than staring at a blank canvas at this very late stage! This deadline has galvanised me to produce some interesting work.

Footnote 1: For completeness, this is the other painting I am currently considering. Acrylic applied with fingers and a palette knife, on a 75cm x 50cm canvas.

Footnote II. Re: Winged Angels, in other news it’s the 20th anniversary of the unveiling of The Angel Of The North this week, cool huh.

Footnote III. I opted for the black and blue piece, titling it ‘The Gathering’. Let’s see how I get on…